Java Add-On Development Kits?

Wombchimp asks: "For all of us who program in Java, the development kit is vital to do the slightest piece of coding. But I seriously doubt that there is one person who has not made some custom utility class to fill a void in the JDK. Why is there no real widely known organisation to collate and develop an add-on development kit which could fill this void and collect a database of useful utility classes? Most sites seem to offer full blown applications, but the odds are it took some useful assistant classes to build it. The closest I've managed to find is the Giant Java Tree, which isn't really organised enough to see if what you want has already been coded, and Gnu's Java Library, which doesn't really have enough. What do you think? Is there some site already filling this gap? Or is this idea a waste of time? "

Comments

Gamelan?

[ptomblin]

I haven't looked at it in a long while, but Gamelan used to be a pretty comprehensive archive. It only had one major flaw - it mixed in commercial stuff and "freeware" together, and it was hard to find just open source or whatever.

Another archive was JARS. Again, I don't think they really made much differentiation between stuff you could buy and stuff whose source code you could look at.


--
A "freaking free-loading Canadian" stealing jobs from good honest hard working Americans since 1997.

A good idea...

[SuperKendall]

I think it's a great idea, and not well served at the moment - just recently I was looking for a simple Java FTP client that I could call programatically, and had to look all over the place to find a decent one.